Thinking about politics and the internet: time to update our perspective

We need a politics
of the internet focused as much on creativity and imagination as on structure,
space and intersection

The meteoric rise in popularity of the Pirate Party in
Germany, the place of Facebook and Twitter in the recent upheavals in the Arab
world, the potential for e-government, serious games for economic progress and development,
citizen journalism, and, last but not least, the viral KONY2012-campaign
show all too clearly that the Internet is of increasing relevance in people’s
life in general, and in politics in particular.

As a result, it is a favoured topic for political analysts
and commentators who offer theories as to the role of the Internet in and for contemporary
politics. With each new civil society upheaval, the debate reignites asking whether
the uses of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, are significant enough to
merit the relabelling of these upheavals as ‘Facebook-’ or ‘Twitter-revolutions’.

More generally, there is an ongoing (at times heated) debate
about if and how the Internet could be a solution for a number of
democracy-related problems that analysts detect within the contemporary global
context. Many of the commentaries comprising this debate are of value, including
James Curran’s
elaboration on ‘why the Internet has changed so little’, in the sense that it
has failed to meet many of our expectations for political and social change. This
and other analyses of the Internet offer rich and varied discussion of the
relevance of the Internet for political analysis.

And yet, despite this, contemporary political accounts of
the role and significance of the Internet are somewhat ‘tame’ or even ‘tamed’.
There are two reasons for this.

The first is that the majority of political analyses concerned
with the Internet start with questions that are shaped by
pre-determined, discipline-specific concerns - for example, issues related to the
Internet’s (potential) impact on
politics, and whether it can help to overcome the specific (normative or
realist) problems that political analysts diagnose as shortcomings in and of
contemporary democracies. Typically, these shortcomings relate to issues of
participation and deliberation. On the one hand, analysts set out to
investigate whether the Internet can improve the style and level of political
participation: and on the other side, there is a sense - and indeed a hope -
that the Internet could serve as a (Habermasian) public sphere, an open and accessible space for genuine debate and discourse
on social concerns. Guiding these analyses is a dual conceptualisation of the
Internet where it is understood both as a tool,
a (new kind of) medium that is used by political actors to do something, and as
a (new kind of) space, a sphere in
which (new) things happen.

The second reason for ‘tame’ analyses of the Internet
in political science is the tendency to treat it as something separate from the
‘real’ world. Many analysts employ an unexamined distinction between the
offline and the online world. More often than not, this conceptual separation
is implicit and naturalised; it is, for example, apparent when analysts ask for
the impact of the Internet ‘on’ something. This categorical distinction between the offline and the
online appears to be a v2 of the notion of the ‘great
divide’, one of the key foundational notions
of International Relations theory.

Acknowledging these two trends in the majority
of existing approaches to the Internet by political analysts is important. The very
idea or notion of ‘the Internet’ that many mainstream political analysts deploy
is trimmed and ‘tamed’ through the norms and concerns ‘natural’ to their
existing views of the world and the philosophical assumptions that underpin
them. In other words, it is a very specific kind of Internet that is being
described, investigated and debated.

The Internet
approached from a different direction

In our chapter in Global Civil
Society 2012, we
address these problems directly and suggest an alternative understanding of the
Internet to trigger a rethinking and a re-configuration of the conceptual frame
that has guided political analyses hitherto. We start from different premises. Two
conceptual steps are at the heart of our endeavour. First, instead of
conceptualising the Internet as a virtual space
and / or tool for activism, or indeed
as a ‘new type of territory’, as some analysts do, we follow theorists of
digital culture and suggest that the Internet must be understood as a ‘set of
interactions in process’. This involves envisaging the Internet as a set of resources,
engagements, relations and structures through which the world is constantly
renewed – rather than as a material object or single entity.

As
we explain, this alternative conception of the Internet is a consequence of its
two main features, namely its digital nature (which means that it is immaterial
and constantly open to change) and the ‘ethos’ of Web 2.0 (which relates to a
culture of sharing, editing, re-editing, producing, re-producing, creating new
forms of relation, prosuming etc).

Secondly, instead of
thinking of the Internet as a thing separate from the ‘real’ world, that is,
instead of working with the notion of a ‘great divide’ between the offline and
the online (real/virtual, material/symbolic), we suggest that scholars take
recent studies seriously and acknowledge that the Internet today is
fundamentally intertwined with socio-political structures and ‘offline’ lived
realities.

Our
reconfiguration of the conceptual frame through which to study the Internet holds
two interlinked implications for political analysts’ scholarly imagination.
Once we decide that the distinction between the ‘offline’ and the ‘online’ does
not readily reflect contemporary lived reality, the Internet occupies a different
position in our thinking about politics. Rather than asking how or if the
Internet has the potential of changing or improving the ‘real’ world, we need
to consider it as a part of a (political) world brought into being through
complex sets of interactions between the offline and the online.

Life itself

Understanding
the Internet as a set of interactions in
process throws into question the value of the conceptual metaphors of ‘tool’ and ‘space’, because questions about what is happening ‘on’ the Internet, and how the
internet is used, by whom, and with what impact on the ‘actual’ world no longer
have sufficient analytical purchase. The internet is not a tool or a space for
politics, but a set of interactions in process that constitute the political,
and indeed the social and the economic. As such it is not a tool or a space to
enable life, but life itself. This is what David Gauntlett intends inMaking is Connecting when he says that the internet is a set
of processes in which “people are rejecting the givens and are making their
world anew”. And as Henrietta Moore argues in Still Life, this requires political and social analysts to focus as
much on the concepts of creativity and imagination as they do on those of
structure, space and intersection. We need a politics of the internet, and
indeed a politics that starts from somewhere else.

About the author

Sabine
Selchow is a researcher in the Civil Society and Human Security Research
Unit at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK.

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